Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
Townies—that was what the insurance investigators concluded.
The townies waited for February break, when most of the students were away and campus security was half-staffed. At some point
side of campus. They emerged from the woods at the parking lot behind the library. The lot was normally under the watchful
eye of a security camera, mounted twenty feet off the ground on a lamppost. But a couple of weeks earlier, some girls—Allison
Shiner and Donna McBride—had had a contest to see if either of them could hit it with a snowball, and it turned out they could.
It hadn’t been repaired yet.
That was a little convenient, the camera getting wiped out a few weeks before the break-in, but there had been something of
a sport all winter long of nailing the cameras with snowballs. There had been anonymous leaflets about living in a surveillance
society and outrageous suggestions that security used the cameras to ogle girls. Snowballing a camera had become something
of a way to prove one was a good feminist. By early February only about eight of the twenty on-campus security cameras were
in good working order. Allison and Donna were never serious suspects. They were in Texas at the time of the robbery and couldn’t
reasonably have had anything to do with the break-in. In fact, no Rackham students were ever questioned about a possible role
in the theft, and why would they have been? It occurred during February break, and 80 percent of the student body wasn’t even
in-state.
The thieves had smashed a cellar window and squirmed through into a women’s room on the basement level.
They left an empty bottle of Ripple, in a brown paper bag, in one of the bathroom stalls.
The receipt was still in the bag, and the police traced the purchase to a Chinese takeout in Gogan.
The staff had poor English and worse memories and couldn’t say who they might’ve sold the bottle to—and in any event, they moved a lot of Ripple and Wild Irish Rose in a town like Gogan.
The thieves had also abandoned a set of bolt cutters in the library’s Special Collection (the price tag was still on the handle;
it had been purchased at the Ace Hardware in Gogan; Sorry, officer, we sell one or two of those every day, and most of our customers buy in cash). The townies used the bolt cutters to clip the lock on the safe where the most expensive books were kept and had cleared
it out, took it all. They helped themselves to a sack of rarities off the shelves as well. The real point of the trip appeared
to be vandalism, however. Someone had spray-painted rackham girls are stuck-up biches on the walnut checkout counter. (“Did you really have to misspell it?” Gwen asked Colin with a weary sigh. Colin said, “If
local law enforcement is going to hold prejudices, I’m going to take advantage of them. That’s on them, not me.”)
Many of the most valuable books were recovered a few days later. An anonymous tip pointed police to a burned-out 1970 Chevy
Monte Carlo, located at the We-Buy-Your-Wreck in west Gogan. Something like thirty books were found in the trunk (along with
a sizable quantity of high-grade blue marijuana), although several valuable volumes (Enoch Crane’s journal among them) were
never recovered.
It was notable that We-Buy-Your-Wreck did have functioning security cameras, and one of them offered a good view of the Monte Carlo. There was no video of the heisters
stashing their stolen goods. We-Buy-Your-Wreck reused the same videotapes over and over, recording for twenty-four hours,
then rewinding and starting over. They hadn’t saved any of the footage from the day the library was looted. But there was
video from Wednesday night, taped just ten hours before the police were tipped off that they could find some of the books
at the junkyard.
In the recording, a gangly man with pale hair, wearing baggy carpenter jeans and a flannel jacket, wandered through the yard of wrecks and then sat down on the trunk of the Monte Carlo.
He lifted his chin and stared directly into the camera.
He patted the trunk and smirked and lifted a hand in a wave hello.
His eyes were black holes in his narrow, country-boy face.
They ran the footage on the local news: Do you know this man?
It was an unsettling forty seconds of video.
The image hiccupped and jumped, so one instant the man in the image would be
sitting on the trunk, and in the next he’d be on his feet, peering straight into the camera’s lens. Sometimes he seemed like
he was six feet tall . . . and sometimes he stretched like an image in a fun house mirror. His hands were white blurs. The
quality of the video was badly degraded (no surprise, given how often the junkyard recycled their tapes) so that the shadows
around him seemed to simmer and twitch with a life of their own.
“Who the hell is that?” Arthur asked, when they were all gathered in The Briars, watching the late local news together.
“I don’t know,” Colin said, but he was smiling. “Maybe it’s the conscientious fellow who called in the tip.”
“You called in the tip,” Van said.
“Oh, that’s right,” Colin said. “I remember now. I did. I also remember what I was doing, the evening before I called the tip in . . . the night this weirdo walked into the junkyard.
I was transferring the Elwood Hondo footage to VHS, wanted to be able to watch it without setting up the projector. Maybe
that’s who it is. Maybe Elwood wanted to say hello.”
“What a crock of shit,” Donna said.
“We pulled a dragon out of the Long Dark through the sheer power of belief,” Colin said. “You accept that but you can’t believe
Elwood Hondo might’ve slipped out of an old film to give us a wink and a wave? Look at him. Look right now at the guy in the
security footage. Are you completely sure he isn’t looking back at you?”
On the TV the gaunt man grinned into the camera, gazing with black, bottomless eye sockets. Arthur sank into the couch, putting
his shoulder against Gwen’s. He didn’t like the sudden sensation of being stared at. Not one bit.
There was a flaw in the security tape. The whole image bent and twisted to one side then jumped forward a few seconds in time. When the image clarified, the junkyard wanderer was gone. It was less as if he had walked out of the frame and more as if he had simply dissolved. He was never identified.